For example, in Swift, if you declare a function to throw an exception, then by God every call to that function, all the way up the stack, must be adorned with a do-try block, or a try!, or a try?
I agree with him on this point. Sounds similar to how it’s in Java, and I hate it. I always wrap my exceptions in a RuntimeExceptions because of this.
I disagree with him the rest of the post. The job of the programmer is to communicate the intent of the program. Both for others and for yourself. The language provides the tools to do so. If a value is intended to be nullable, then I would like to communicate this intent. I think it’s good when a language provides this tool.
Tests don’t communicate the intent of the code. Tests can’t perfectly validate all the possible edge cases of the system either.